Trump isn’t just talking about taking down higher education now—he’s working to do it. The executive order he signed this week that supposedly protects free speech is really a threat to gag universities and colleges, or cut off their funds if they don’t get with his program.
And that’s just part of the bigger picture here as he tries to control, demean and collapse confidence in the supposed eggheads and elites who, in fact, make up one of America’s essential institutions.
The administration this week announced its plans for overhauling the federal higher education law to more narrowly treat college as just a form of job training. The president’s proposed budget zeros out funds for the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts. And Thursday—weeks after the CPAC rant where he first mentioned it —Trump indeed signed that executive order that supposedly protects free speech on college campuses, even as he keeps threatening to punish schools that he vaguely claims are somehow suppressing it.
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Add it up, and Trump’s efforts threaten to roll back a century of progress in American higher education. It’s a system with real problems, to be sure, but our universities have been the envy of the world, emulated as models and destinations—unsurpassed engines of knowledge production and transmission.
The five-page memo laying out the president’s principles and priorities for higher education re-imagines colleges and universities as mere job training and workforce development centers. Now, all colleges worry and care about outcomes and their alums’ ability to launch into successful and meaningful employment. But to use that as the central measurement is to fundamentally misread what we do while also feeding into the pernicious conservative myth that universities are isolated ivory towers and, like the press, somehow the enemy of the people.
Of course, good programs always consult with employers, but our goal is to develop programs and majors that address not only the needs of employers today but provide an education that allows graduates to achieve the careers of tomorrow. We strive to develop an education that prepares students not only for their first job but their seventh.
Altogether, Trump is attempting to remove from universities their primary function of knowledge creation in the public interest. That would leave research in the hands of the market alone. The research at universities leads to drugs, procedures, art, literature, a deeper understanding of societal issues, and culture that have a lasting impact for generations. If we monetize it narrowly now, we lose all that in the future.
The memo came the same week that Trump finally signed the executive order “protecting” speech on campus. He first brought that up just after he’d weirdly hugged the American flag at CPAC, near the end of his epic two-hour ramble of a speech. Buried inside it, along with his campaign greatest hits, was his hobby horse of campus free speech. This time, he proclaimed action:
“Today I’m proud to announce that I will be very soon signing an executive order requiring colleges and universities to support free speech if they want federal research grants.”
I thought at the time of his campaign promise to build the wall and have Mexico pay for it. But this time, Trump did act, signing an executive order commanding that “the heads of covered agencies shall, in coordination with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, take appropriate steps, in a manner consistent with applicable law, including the First Amendment, to ensure institutions that receive Federal research or education grants promote free inquiry.”
The Executive Order gives authority to the “heads of covered agencies” to apply a vague definition of “free inquiry.” And that, I fear, opens up the potential for the state to define and limit, by withholding funding, speech in the name of free speech. Just the fear of losing federal funding and having our students denied access to federal student aid and loans will be enough to chill campus speech.
This set of policies and budget proposals can tear down a higher education system that for many millions is the only institutional means up the social and economic ladder. Reading this policy turn as part of his larger reimagined higher education plan should frighten us.
It’s easy to dismiss the president’s ideas as misguided, ill-informed, and unnecessary. But, the president knows his base mistrusts and despises academe. A recent Pew Center survey of Republicans found that 79 percent of them were unhappy with college faculty. The president is feeding this perception. He is, after all, a very smart reader of the social moment. Therefore, simply to ignore the new policy direction doesn’t diminish it as an issue. It needs to be confronted head-on.
At CPAC, Trump brought with him to the stage the conservative activist Hayden Williams, who was recently punched on the campus of UC Berkeley as he tried to organize for the conservative group Turning Point USA. Punching anyone is never a solution, but it should be noted that neither Williams nor the man who allegedly punched him are affiliated with the university. Trump, of course, did not note any of that. Williams was brought out to symbolize the silencing of speech on college campuses.
What’s at stake here is no less than the heart and soul of higher education in the United States. Trump’s order threatens to put an ideological purity test on federal funds. This is something that democracies don’t do. It’s something that’s opposed to the free speech he claims his order would protect.
Universities have joined the news media as targets of the president’s push to accelerate the decline of public confidence in institutions that we once turned to offer a more common set of knowledge and facts that we could then consider and discuss.
Finally, the president’s plans will hurt millions of current and future students who are already navigating declining government funding at all levels, a predatory system of for-profit colleges, and the diminishing of our democracy.
Thomas Jefferson’s words register as a warning now: "An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people." Let’s stand up for our institutions of higher learning and our democracy.
